no.1  Tualatin Heritage Centre

The Heritage Center is a great place to learn about all kinds of local history, including the "deep time" history of the Ice Age. The city of Tualatin has a long history of preserving Ice Age artifacts and sharing the ice age story with visitors and residents.

Outside the building, you’ll find two erratic boulders, torn from bedrock hundreds of miles away and carried to the Tualatin area in rafts of glacial ice. Look for the bronze plaques that tell the story of the boulders’ journey—and of the Tualatin residents who recognized them for the treasures they are.

Inside, marvel at other ice age treasures:

• A molar and a tusk from a mastodon, unearthed less than a mile from here. Stained tea-brown by the peat deposits in which they were found, the fossils were excavated in 1962 by a Portland geology student. To see the rest of the mastodon bones, visit the Tualatin Public Library (tour stop #2).

• The fossilized sacrum (part of the pelvis) and two vertebrae from a Harlan’s ground sloth, discovered in the late 1960s at the confluence of Fanno Creek and the Tualatin River.